How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math

Re:How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math by jrs99 on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @02:10PM (#6727574)

i got As in almost all my classes in math without really understanding anything. It was like a train I couldn't stop. I couldn't ever slow down for a month and say "I'm going to work on trigonometry this whole month so I can know what I'm doing when I do integration." I just had to memorize the steps to get the right answer, get my A, forget it all, and wait for whatever was coming next.

Years later I go straight back to the beginning and figure everything out, starting with Serge Lang's Basic Mathematics. I didn't even know where the Pythagorean Theorem came from, and when I learned it the second time around, it was damn beautiful.

my advice is to go back all the way to the beginning and get a book written by a real mathematician. I.M. Gelfand's Algebra and Trigonometry were truly enlightening.

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Re:How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math by phasetransition on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @03:56PM (#6728434)

Thanks for the book suggestion. I too, would like to go through and replace the "method" regions with "conceptual" understanding

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Re:How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math by selimthegrim on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @09:09PM (#6730082)

In that vein, may I also suggest Ordinary Differential Equations by V.I. Arnol'd.

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